Technology

Understanding computer vision

Computer vision is slowly bringing the artificial intelligence pot to a boil.

22 February 2021

Hello, world? No, we’ve moved on. Today, the first words of a computer might well be ‘I see you’. At the start of this century, we marvelled at the idea that machines could ‘see’ at all. We saw many failures to achieve that during the very early days of autonomous cars and the DARPA challenges that sparked their latest evolution.

Yet at the same time, we’ve been oblivious to the fact that computers could see all along: be it face detection on a compact camera or converting a scan into digital text using OCR technology. Computer vision only really captured our imagination in recent years, carried by the amazement of self-driving vehicles and paranoia about face recognition. Above all, computer vision and image processing are the poster children of artificial intelligence, perhaps because they are easier to understand.

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